ALFRED JENSEN @ DOUGLAS HYDE

Okay, I got confused when I heard about this exhibition and thought I was going to see SERGEJ Jensen, who I love. It wasn't exactly a bad surprise, but rarely have I seen a painting exhibition that felt like so much work. Born in Guatemala, but spending his formative years in Denmark and then France before settling in New York, Jensen's idiosyncratic style drew from an odd set of esoteric sources, from Goethe's colour theories to Mayan calenders. His richly impastoed and vibrantly patterned canvases are at once playful and programmatic, a strangely colourful set of mathematical proofs.

Its sort of, well, maddening, the boxes filled with numbers and strange glyphs constantly seem like puzzles begging to be solved, like those frustrating IQ test things. Its this strange dissonance between order and poetry that gives this work their hypnotic charm, their atavistic half-coherence always setting in motion a system of legibility it shirks its promise to resolve. The fact that the heavily textured surfaces recall tapestries underlines the primevalism and sense of pre-linguistic order that Jensen infuses his work with.

I mean I want to say something about the colour though, the colour is harsh and acidic and really fucking vibrant. Its never really *contained* by the copositions, it seems to push outside it. His shuddering lines don't really to the best job of containing his ostentations colour choices within his ordered geometries. The gingham design of "The Marriage of Odd and Even Numbers" is a bewitching monkey-puzzle, you spend the whole time staring at it, trying to decode its strange logic, even within its formally constraining grid structure (Jensen favours the contiguity of squares rectangles and diamod shapes) the interference between different sequences and cycles resolves itself messily and mysteriously.

LOCKY MORRIS @ MOTHER'S TANKSTATION

There's something really awesome about enjoying a show that does a lot of things that have become automatic turnoffs. The current show, by Derry-based artist Locky Martin, trades in a kind of anecdotal neo-Conceptualism, in the vein of Sophie Calle. I see this stuff more at degree shows & c. and its really something that seems a bit tired. Mainly what was refreshing was that it seemed to abandon the two major crutches that you usually come across with work of this kind: an overly elaborate tricksiness or an over-ripe fascination with its own retro-isms (you know the kind of polaroids and super8 stuff that really gets caught up in empty nostalgia real quick)

The centre-piece of the show is a sound/sculpture installation based on the cover of a recording of Chopin Preludes, a piano seen through a rain-streaked window, a view the artist found eerily like the view of a piano seen through the door of a church near his studio. A photograph of this, along with the record sleeve itself and a haunting, repeated piano chord recorded in the studio itself are hung around a piano top. There's a definite nakedness about the presentation, eloquent and beautiful but no overt cleverness or cute resolution.

I mean there's something throw away, but also fresh-feeling about the photograph of a splayed white dog lying next to an upturned plastic lawn chair, the way it rhymes the forms is funny and smart without being glib and knowing. I guess its an attitude thing I enjoyed about this show, not exactly innovative or new but capable of striking the right chord and with a generous individuality.

I feel like a big part of the kudos for these shows at MTS has to go to the gallery itself. I've been to a few shows here, and while I understand that they have some unique ethos or whatever, I won't pretend I really know what it is, just that whatever it is it seems to work. For a start, every show I've seen here has been so confidently staged, I'm thinking here of the sculpture that is just the empty blister-packets of antacids held in the slide-holder from a projector. But, and I don't think this is beside the point here, it looks good. It sits in the space with a kind of airy insouciance.

I think its a pretty huge credit to this place that I've never managed to go there w/o getting into a coversation of some kind with one of the staff, usually the gallerist herself, and always initiated by them. I mean there's this genuine feeling that they want people to come and see the art on show here, and on this particular occasion i got a lot out of the brief chat I had with the assistant working there. Her take on the pieces was interesting and I especially liked her pointing out the anecdote behind From Day One, the piece which lends its title to the exhibition, a card collar holder from his daughter's shirt left lying on the carpet, preserved here -square piece of carpet and all- in a square glass vitrine. His poor wife she said, imagine the empty square left in their sitting room.

Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts @ IMMA

The current marquee exhibition at IMMA is strangely high-concept. Based around the collection of minimalist composer and Ab-Ex scenester Morton Feldman, the show is a welcome opportunity to see some high-water American mid-century abstraction along with some, um, rugs.

Feldman's relationship with the irascible set (and the strong influence of post-war NY painting on the development of his compositional style) has meant that Feldman's music has become the de facto soundtrack to late American modernism. This relationship seems crystallized in the use of his music in scoring Hans Namuth's short films of Pollock's and de Kooning's studios, among the most iconic documents of the Abstract Expressionist generation, as well as his elegiac Rothko Chapel.

I had given myself the idea that this was going to include some Barnett Newman's and I was disappointed that it didn't, I also kinda felt like there was a lot of talk about the Pollocks, but as far as i remember, there were only two (one I can't remember at all, the other was absolutely stunning, the name escapes me, but it was enamel and gesso on paper, and had a pulsing lyricism I don't normally expect from Pollock, especially on a small scale)

Feldman's artistic and personal relationship with the New York art scene, ends up providing a really subtle and interesting structure for the show, especially as big, blue chip shows like this can often feel bulky and white-elephantish, the inclusion of the aforementioned Namuth films, as well as a (really hypnotic) film of Mondrian's last studio, helped flesh out and illuminate the overlapping artistic narratives, alluded to in, for eg., a little Philip Guston drawing dedicated to "mortyfeldman" or naming a piece after critic/poet/fire-island casualty Frank O'Hara. I mean a major problem I have with this sometimes is that, and this is really tempting for somebody like me who is a bit too romantic about this era, it becomes way too fetishistic about '50s NYC as a kind of garrulous bohemia, too author-centric, too nostalgic.

A nice thing to be able to say though, is that the work in the show is so top notch that it makes those criticisms feel pretty irrelevent. The Towering Franz Kline for eg. is really virtuoso and thrilling in a way that you don't really see anymore, its dexterity amplified by a thrilling lack of futzing around. Which is funny because the put it right next to a Philip Guston where a gnawing indecision seems to be the only structure for the canvas. (this pairing is pretty much the highlight of the show, and pretty much all the Guston's in this show are awesome and revelatory for me) where rash-like, inflamed reds and pinks disintegrate like a tissue used as a cloth into a meaty dead flesh grey (giving off weirdly ectoplasmic turqoise halos).

Elsewhere, more ink drawings by Guston, some of them feeling real contemporary, have a kind of half-interested verve, that is, a dashed off yet fine-pointed facility with line and an easy way of electrifying a page.

I don't really know what else to say, it is a major disappointment that the final room is a collection of rugs he bought. I mean I guess the curators felt they really needed to the biographical concept of the show, but I really care more about it being a good show to be honest, which, I mean, it was.

Show Runs until 27th June

STEPHEN GUNNING @ MOTHER'S TANKSTATION

I spent longer watching the two videos that comprise this show than i normally do (i am hella philistine abt video in gen.) for a number of reasons but they were all pretty practical. Mother's Tankstation is the furthest out of the city's galleries and since it wasn't open when I walked out past NCAD I had to come back later especially. And it was cold, and I kinda had a headache and I didn't really wanna get back out into the weather so I just kinda chilled there a bit.

And I'm pretty glad I did. Duration feels important in this exhibition. Just inside the door there is a looped shot of a the feet of that Turkish (dancing) where they wear those full length tunic things and spin, I wanna say Dervish. The soundtrack is a bit like some 90's dubby techno with the beats dropped out, slightly menacing and purposeful sub-bass frequencies. Its hypnotic and strange, and in its abstraction of a specific cultural form it signals the theme which is not really so much being discussed in this exhibition as it haunts it or clings to it. Something to do with cultural tourism, a kind of fetishistic Otherness.

The main gallery is a static shot of tourists coming and going from a mosque, taking scarves from the pile provided, putting their shoes in little plastic baggies. Its effect is cumulative, just the repeating of the gesture over and over it becomes ritualistic in its own right, but also operates in the interstices whereby two cultures interface with each other but not in a waythat is abt engaging with each other, more abt watching each other, reducing and fetishising. I felt woozy and strange after watching it.

Stephen Gunning - Journeyman @ Mother's tankstation, exhibition runs until 13 Feb, 2010 4-6pm daily.

MARK GARRY @ KERLIN

theres a moment in this exhibition where you look up @ "Folds", an installation made from a rainbow of sewing-thread strung from one-wall to another, and the thing has disappeared, what you see is just the soft radiation of colour, like the little rainbows you see when someone waters the lawn in summer. Its kindof amazing, and even though the poetry of it feels a little cheap, its sort of the point.

I mean i was rollin my damn eyes when I saw that the little feather palm tree (garishly yellow!) was called "to say a psalm for now" i mean lol its great, like a joke your dad would tell. But when you see it from across the room it leaves a reflected yellow circle on the wall.

Anyway pretty good, its got a bit of Jessica Stockholder abt it, I mean the overall aesthetic is pretty Euro Two but there are moments when something else bubbles up and punctures that (felt like the balsa-wood flowers were him jamming his tongue way into his cheek tho) but it didn't make me think abt the universe, or anything at all really when I left (also there was like three things that i didn't "get" like at all) but thats just me i guess.

DAMIEN FLOOD @ GREEN ON RED

I love the way this guy paints; it looks fun, like finger painting. but though they are built from slick syrupy skeins of oily paint, the miniature abstractions in this show Counter Earth feel weirdly restrained. Like, he's not just playing with his poo r anything, there's a definite feeling that each painting riffs around some compositional motif so that the general feeling is playful but ordered.

I like the way these paintings feel like abstractions that cohere around some pictorial chassis, like it feels less like there are references to landscapes than certain paintings take on the structures of landscape painting for one example. Its a useful way of thinking abt the historicity of painting in a way that still facilitates a kind of lightness of approach, like you can just use all these phrasings without having to necc get all referential or reverential about them.

A couple of paintings just as you enter the main gallery space seem like pretty prime examples of this. (They immediately put me in mind of Thomas Nozkowski, a painter whose work pitches itself in a register somewhere between optical and process based and who seems a likely influence esp in the acidic greens and lurid reds that both use.). Both paintings employ the same basic colour pallette, a narrow band of multicoloured lozenges stutter accross the picture plane, but while one is bare the other is fractured. both appear to be based on a row of books on a shelf, but i held off saying this because it feels like they were arrived at instead of the image being "based on" them.

4get abt that tho for a second bc thats just really a bone im tryin to pick with the universe maybe.

on that note this video of thomas nozkowski talking abt his process is pretty next level as far as painters being smart and bs free abt their studio process etc. recommended.

JAMES CASTLE @ DOUGLAS HYDE

Could this guy write? I thought he couldn't, well there's a lot of writing in this show, but its still difficult to know because what is there is either copied from logotypes or weird letter-ish symbols, its kinda great because it shows how biographical detail becomes helpful in decoding how this guy's work uh worked and how it becomes weirdly more expansive than private through the pile up of these weird codings. For that to work tho u do need to kno a little abt how this guy. He was deaf and he had v. little schooling and almost never left Idaho I think. He never learned to read or write or speak and the weird scraps of drawings in this show are a selection of the one method he had of communicating with the world.

Okay so I wasn't buying that line first, becoz the first thing u c r all these family portrait things only with weird box ppl and its a bit, well, this kinda "ppl r strange 2 me" narrative is exactly what puts most ppl off abt "outsider art" isn't it? turning mental patients, hillbillies and chimpanzees into weird cyphers and mouthpieces of our id r whatever, u kno, the standard this-is-offensive line. But they're just one thing and the rest of the exhibition is great in a way that kinda dismantles that early criticism which is really just caffeine+opinions lets be honest here.

I'm not gonna launch into some lengthy exposition of why i fucking love writing-in-painting lately, but that reciprocation and disconnection between two different functions of markmaking is really interesting to me at the moment so it was definitely the strategy that led me into this and not just jumping on some reactionary stance just for the sake of it. But at the same time its not really something I can talk abt right now in shortform because I'm digesting my thots on this in a big way in larger form atm so I'm just gonna leave it for now and you're gonna have to take it from me that there is something going on here that is clever and knowing, and its abt an interest in language that is complex and fragmentary and ambivalent and that the two drawings of letters are stuttering and nicely played but work in a stratum just beneath words so you should really just see them tbh.

Highlight of the show though are these really great little landscapes, done i suppose in the artist's spit 'n' ashes ink. Nearly all of the same small-town backyard setting they walk a thin line between claustrophobic n intimite but moreso are really fascinating just for their dense compositions, the way eaves of rooftops sing with telephone wires from and lines that lock and groove out from each other in a way that is both incredibly fluent and anxiously groping. Also the dense tangles of patchy brushland, the nervous neatness of well kept lawns, everything seems expressive in its own silence. I nearly forgot to mention the interiors that seem incredibly descriptive of watery light filling a room from a few feet away, but up close are nearly crude and childish, this is pretty much the weird condition of this whole show tho.

Also shit like drawing on crappy old scraps of paper will get u very far in my books and this had really cool frames that hooked on at the sides in this weird way and were all cool and super minimalist in this great way when contrasted with the delicacy of the falling-apart, yellowing notepaper and scraps of things that Castle used for supports including these genuinely fucking weird doll things that I wanna see again b4 i die! I hope I get to go back in time for the Mike Nelson thing anyway, I'm perennially semi curious abt him u kno.

random dublin stuff

Group show of kevin kavanagh was good, def worth it to see the Mark Swords paintings, the one called quilt made me crack up! Also, I had never heard of Margaret Corcoran before, one of hers was rubbish, the other great. I can't find the list of works so I can't remember which was which, but it was the smaller of the two, with a plaque-like shiny surface.

I would have more for this post, but once again pallas projects and mothers tankstation weren't open. Fair enough MT are showing a film twice a day so they're only open for showings, I should have checked it out, but I won't bother going back to Pallace Projects because I feel like a right dick waiting outside to be let in and then realising nobody's coming, again. its not exactly conveniently located.

Also, I'm gonna blog someday soon about my undying love for Agnes Martin, and my plans for a pilgrimage to her life that i'm paying for one cappuccino at a time working in a coffee shop, but I just wanna mention the Ellsworth Kelly - Agnes Martin - Seán Shanahan trio of paintings that are part of the current display of the permanent collection at Hugh Lane. I fucking amazing treat for me. It was a pretty great day all in all as I did manage to see the paintings in the Ross O'Donnell show I had to miss at Cross Gallery, they were stacked in the downstairs gallery and I had a rummage, I know I prolly shouldn't have but its not like they're old masters and it was totally worth it.

ALICE MAHER @ GREEN ON RED

Ok I figure ur supposed to have an opinion on this exhibition. First time I've ever seen another person in this gallery while I was there, and there was like six. And its been on a while. tbh I never really got what was supposed to make this chick any better than the girls I used to see copping her moves at art-school and I don't know if this show is gonna be the one to change my mind.

First off this seemed okay. There were framed prints made from the animations which comprise the main bulk of the exhibition. I wondered about how they left in the rubbed out bits somehow. I wish I knew more abt printmaking processes sometimes.

So Alice Maher's schtick is like this queasy dissection of the body and she's obsessed with hair, but beyond that, I really didn't know what I was meant to extrapolate from this exhibition. When William Kentridge does the one page animation thing, its abt histories that can't be erased maybe, when Maher does it she just seems to be exploiting its inherent visual seductiveness. Bodies morph, mutate, merge and disolve, turning into bees and balls of hair and the sound is close mic-ed and uncomfortable in its detail. There's a level of skill in the drawing (even if her faces are a bit awkward and junior-cert-ey at times) but there's not a whole lot of um variation in how she makes the mutations happen. Like, you won't be mad at yourself for trekking out to see this, but I doubt you'll be that into it either, but then what do I know.

ISABEL NOLAN @ KERLIN GALLERY

You know those shops that sell vaguely modernist home decor art? You know, half assed appropriations of Abstract Expressionism only in shades that will match your new couch. Well that's what this exhibition kinda reminded me of. I don't mind that, in fact I think its kinda funny! It's the reverse of making paintings that look like dulux color cards, fine art refiltering itself thru its own appropriation by um Ikea maybe. Nolan gives you stacks of Tuttle-octagons, watercolours of Degas sculptures and Munch sunsets. Wished there was more focus on painting, the sculptures do have a roughly hewn precision and a funky, eclectic use of materials, but Nolan does have nice, insouciant touch and her bright primaries are strained and stretched at the edges in a way that sets up its own tensions, distinct from the appropriated compositions. Also, embroidery tables? Give me a break, shit's been done really.

ross mc donnell

I don't really know what Cros Gallery's deal is. They've had a couple of kickass shows lately mixed with a few mediocre ones. This one looks fucking great, wish it was on for more than 18 days because I might not get to actually see it. (I had plans to make it up next thursday, but it looks like that might not happen now, hmmm). Yeah, work and etc. Anyway, I feel like I should give this a mention anyway because at least from the jpegs this looks great. Messy and funny and with weird colours, dude streaks thick lines over anemic smears of paint, parts are collaged, pieces of imagery are reconfigured and put back together in ways that seem askew and lackadaisical. I like the slacker aesthetic, but it also seems like it masks something more methodical that I can't really put my finger on (duh, was hoping seeing them in the flesh would give me a clue!)

Anyway, its nice to see that this kind of abstraction is being done by younger painters, it feels like it has definite roots in 70's abstract painting, but thankfully doesn't feel like it needs to update the politics of that era, instead the introductions of imagery on the periphery of the optical register feels like a shrug in the direction of having something to look at, I like that, these are obviously abstract paintings, but they kinda flirt around with imagery and pictorial space in an easy-going and charming way. What I mean to say is its not exactly "the message" or whatever that is so appealing, but the tone of voice. You get the feeling you could hang out with this guy.



Over washed Nirvana T-Shirt translates faded worn cotton and that lame t-shirt everyone had in school (I fucking love nirvana but that t-shirt is stupid imo) you know, the one with the crooked smile, and hastily reassembles it as scribbled-in patches of greenish black oil paint, the outlines are the pinkish underpainting smeared up onto the top surface of the paint. A big theme is maybe a tension between different pictorial surfaces and redepictions of them, in which case a t-shirt is really, i dunno clever? Would like to see as well how these play out with the relationships between different layers of paint, large parts seem like they operate more in terms of obscuring what's beneath them than projecting outwards which is a great idea maybe, because the markmaking itself seems pretty bold but the emphasis is inward. Anyway its hard to know just from some jpegs so you should check it out urself and let me know if i'm onto something haha.

A few other things from Dublin

What is the deal with the Cross Gallery, they always have semi-cool stuff downstairs and boring mom-art upstairs, well the two times I've been there. I think downstairs might be called "nag" and be their emerging art things maybe. Anyway, downstairs is worth a look, but I'm too lazy to go into it right now, long day, etc.

Are Monster truck ever open?

I liked the thing I saw in green on red, there was one drawing done by scratching out a mirror and another done by printing on the back of reflective Glass, space used really nicely to show big silvery video, drawings were pretty great. This was it btw.

Went to the Munch exhibition in the National Gallery. Didn't think I was a huge fan, but holy shit could he draw!

Kathy Predergast in the Kerlin was a bit disappointing, was a bit like a third year crit, esp. with douchebaggy NCAD seminar taking place there. Reminded me why I was so glad to finish art school haha. Lots of stuff with inked out maps, not as compelling as here map drawings and seemed a bit tossed off to be honest.

I liked the thing that was about sports maybe in the RHA with the big sculpture, some of the paintings were really stunning and the whole thing had a snottiness about it that in a weird way reminded me of Infinite Jest (which I will one day finish I swear). Hadn't a clue what it was about though.

I knew Mother's Tankstation was gonna be closed but I still checked cos I am a loser like that. Love that place, hope I catch the next thing that opens.

That's pretty much all I can remember, but I have a feeling I'm forgetting some stuff.

OLIVER COMERFORD @ KEVIN KAVANAGH

Okay so this isn't something I'd normally go for, and by the time I got here I was wet and cold and it was getting late and I still hadn't even made it to IMMA yet and I confess, I zipped around it pretty quickly. I like Kevin Kavanagh, its a really corporate looking building in a poncey development with a Radisson. It feels like a proper upmarket gallery, like a gagosian or something. The space itself is quite nice, its hard to define exactly but the office is there but not intrusive, the bit with the guestbook provides a little room to show a smaller intimate work and yet the inner gallery is a very versatile size.

Oliver Comerford, I'd never come across him before I think, seems to specialise in large photo-based paintings. Wait come back, this isn't some "ghosts of history" Luc Tuymans played out thing, and it doesn't play on the romance celluloid fetishism. It just reminds me of glancing out a bus window as the light starts to fade. There is a definite sense of Irish Countryside, Light, and a delicately and intricately structured casualness. Its not the most glamorous trick to pull off, and it seems unlikely to win him any kudos but then, Maureen Gallace is an art star now so who knows. Anyway this was nice and I'm glad I saw it, even if I didn't care too much when I was there.

PHILLIPE PARRENO @ IMMA

This was kind of fun. Just a good old fashioned head fuck in my opinion. Okay there were easy points made on the deconstructive potential of cultural detritus but I was more interested in how it used the space, activated it, moved around it. The voice of the woman from the video piece that echoed and careened through the rooms of the gallery The yellowing of the windows and the shiny things. It was a bit empty, but it was entertaining, and you could see the whole thing in a few minutes. Great info sheet too, like a randomly torn page from one of those Phaidon books.

LYNDA BENGLIS @ IMMA

Feel like there's an essay in the works on this one, so I'll keep it brief here. This was a great show and one of the reasons that IMMA have been restoring a lot of my previous faith in them after a dodgy couple of years. Lynda Benglis, best known for her ARTFORUM ad featuring her wearing nothing but sunglasses and an, um, dildo, emerged as a figure from the New York Painting Scene of the late 60's early 70's. Thankfully this period has overgone a huge reappraisal in recent years with figures as diverse as Mary Heilmann and Joan Mitchell re-emerging as important and influential. Benglis' work from this period is aggressively feminist in rhetoric, but in its lush materialism and sly disruption of formalism, seems to anticipate queer 90's artists Felix Gonzalez Torres (pro tip for blog readers, if I align anybody with FGT it means I am about to say I like them) and Roni Horn.

I suppose it would be suitable to cite Robert Morris or Judy Chicago, both artists whose awareness of the gendered rhetoric of Minimalism in particular informed their work (Chicago, before she embraced large installations on feminist themes, made quietly prettified Minimalist sculpture) Neither of these artists approached the formal subversion of Benglis though, her flamboyant and gaudy sculptures deconstruct the maleness of the previous decades of american art, the ejaculations of Jackson Pollock and the cool supermensch boy-toys of minimalism, and remake them as bawdy, excessive and bodacious visions of camp femaleness.

Working with latex, wax, plaster, glitter and vibrant acrylics, much of the show has the appearance of Mardi-Gras float casualties (especially due to the repeated use of chicken wire to give many sculptures structure) But it is in this free-floating garishness that the artist stumbles across her radicalness, her affront to bourgeois tastefulness. While her work is lacking in the nuance and subtlety of Mary Heilmann, it makes up for it with sheer willpower. Considering how long it has taken this period of recent history to become canonised, her aggressiveness seems justified yet how odd to think that in a world where Warhol was the most famous living artist, that it took so long for this post-pop abstraction to gain respectability. Still, it is in its persistant un respectability that this show is so much fun, in all its kinky, rubbery trashiness.

Dublin Artist Run Spaces

Okay so there's Pallas Projects but I'm sure there must be more. I fucking love these places, they're always alternating between an overly-friendly community outreach vibe and unfriendly scenesterism. They show stuff that most ppl probably wouldn't really consider art, and tend to be quite difficult to find, yes artist-run-spaces are what I'm talking about. I visited Pallas projects and it took about five minutes to actually get in the door (after walking so far I was determined) and ended up being let in a side door and having to stumble over a bicycle.

These places are great because they don't really expect anybody is ever going to visit them, and I don't blame them. You have to stoop below a sculpture seemingly made from that accordion-type piping that ppl attatch to their tumble dryers to direct the steam out through the window. The space is dominated by two video pieces, one of two cameras pointed at each other, one of a bored-looking girl dangling from the ceiling while occasionally just-as-disinterested visitors mill around her with an expression split between puzzlement and resignment.

Obviously I love this kindof stuff. It makes me happy that there is still systems and a commitment to ppl being silly and making things nobody is interested in for the sake of art! I know this might come across as sarcasm, but these places really do live up to their purported purpose as an alternative to the glossiness of commercial galleries and the canon-building of the museums. I'd be pleased to be given the skinny on any alternative art happenings around the country, I have days off and don't mind bus trips if I can! Hit me up on standardseriesblog@gmail.com

FRANCIS BACON @ HUGH LANE

The problem with the Francis Bacon exhibition in Hugh Lane is that it kindof confirms everything I suspected I didn't like about the painter. Ambitiously staged with many works on loan from private collections and museums, especially the Tate, the exhibition also makes use of the vast store of research materials, photographs and drawings held by the gallery.

Okay, so I started at the wrong side, and was harried around by impatient stewards and guards from my point of entry on (despite entering more than 20 mins before the advertised closing time, wtf?) but I'm sure I'll have at least one more chance to see this show again before it closes. Major Props to the curators who seem to have dissected entire working practice down into its constituent parts, making up the pieces of the puzzle from torn and modified photographs, drawings and reproductions torn from art books.

The first thing that started to bother me was the type of transference we were supposed to feel by looking at certain images in this context. Was looking at the Muybridge repros different here than it was when I leafed through the copy of The Human Figure in Motion held in the Library in college. In both instances the impetus was Bacon, but whereas originally I was drawn to the images on their own terms, here I felt I was being called to infer from these images something latent which would find its real expression in the paintings which are held tantalisingly at bay in the inner rooms of the exhibition. Maybe if the exhibition had only included those Muybridge photographs (whose intended orig purpose was more scientific than artistic) and those photographs which Bacon commissioned as working material. It gets onto much shakier ground when it starts displaying Old Master reproductions.

Having spent four years in art college as a painter I know full well the need and value of surrounding yourself with work that interests and influences you, hell its this impulse that has led to this blog. But it troubled me when I spent a few minutes once again admiring a Michaelangelo drawing, but once again I felt like it was being proposed that I dwell on these as though they were the raw materials of Bacon's art as opposed to the endlessly compelling works of art they themselves are. I don't want to digress too much into Ways of Seeing territory here, but the torn reproductions and smudges of paint that adorned these drawings, in this instance seemed an insinuation of ownership of some kind. It reminded me of the reservations expressed by my art history lecturer and, I'm sure, many more people over the display of the artist's studio on permanent display in the same gallery. Contained in a chilling central chamber, the studio is preserved in detailed accuracy as a holy relic, just as the artist left it, like the bedroom of a deceased child. The preservation makes the studio mystical, displaced from its context, it appears as an apparition of 80's london in its ghostly Hirst-Like vitrine.

In fact we reach the point, when we see the paintings finally, that they seem so easy. This limb from Michaelangelo, this one from Muybridge and this blurred face from a personal snapshot. The look of paintings has never felt more, well, assembled. All of a sudden, the recurring compositions feel more like laziness, as if the painter has found an easy armature onto which he can easily assemble his collage of influence. Even the bravura painting, which had been what I admired most about Bacon, seems easier due to predetermination, not to mention, paling next to the example set by Titian in the previous room.

Bacon's professed appreciation of a young, up-and-coming Hirst before his passing seems more obvious now. Like Hirst, Bacon is more about Punchlines maybe. His paintings seem more illustrative and conceptual than painterly and exploratory. Maybe it is in this light that we should see them. In truth, his appropriation of all this stuff seems a lot less icky in the context of appropriation art such as Sherrie Levine or Glenn Ligon, its just that I find it hard to come to Bacon as a queer artist. For although he operated outside of artworld orthodoxy for most of his career, Bacon never feels like an outsider now. Anyway, if anyone actually reads this blog at least yet, this is one where I'd love some comment box action.

FERGUS FEEHILY @ DOUGLAS HYDE

If there was a driving force behind my recent gallery trip this was it. I first came across Fergus Feehily when he gave a workshop at my art school. It was only with retrospect that I realised how lucky I was to have been there for it as he has since become one of my most admired artists and definitely a major touchstone for the work I have since done. Also Douglas Hyde Gallery has been unbelievable over the last year or so, and while I'm gutted I missed their recent Raoul De Keyser (a major painter in my estimation) show of watercolours, recent enough exhibitions by Karin Mamma Andersson and Miroslav Tichy have been impressively curated and just, really nice to look at.

So its really difficult to get outside of my own perspective on this guy who since I've obsessed over his work, ripped it off and pretty much forced everyone who'll sit still for long enough to look at jpegs of his stuff on my laptop and, as if the fates had organised it, sat at the bottom of the stairs were a bunch of art students with their tutor, seemingly to remind me of why other ppl might not like them. The major theme among the naysayers that I gathered from my not-so-subtle eavesdropping was that the work on show "just didn't really seem like much."

I mean, Douglas Hyde is a big space, with hugely high ceilings an just masses of walls. And Feehily's work is, well, small. Assembled from scraps of wood, assorted paper, fabric, photographs and delicate, tentative passages of painting, it bears a lot of the hallmarks of what Raphael Rubinstein terms "Provisional Painting" in the much talked about recent Art in America feature. And yet the paradox of Feehily's work is that these works, while handmade, sparse and assembled with all their seams showing, are also sumptuous, multi-faceted and jewel-like.

Its pretty hard to articulate on a verbal level the way the tiny jokes, idiosyncratic details and sly formal playfulness all add up to something more and how beautifully the large white walls of Douglas Hyde are utilised so that these events are allowed to register despite their modesty. There's one painting just inside the door, where the frame is cut, presumably assembling two cheap secondhand frames, so that one edge is twice as thick as the other two. It takes a second to register but when it does, it registers as a kind of inward smile. Another painting exploits an extraordinary resonance of colour between of casually daubed pink paint on baby pink card.

Like I said, its pretty hard to verbalise precisely, but these paintings set off a reaction in me like Dougal opening the advent calender in Father Ted, it might not even matter what new detail is unveiled, but it sets off a kind of giddy impulse when a flash of pink from the side of a canvas re-energises the whole painting. They definitely feel like the work of someone who takes a kind of excessive joy in the nuts and bolts of painting. Each painting feels like a series of parcels to be opened, each detail unveils itself in such a way that that comparison just feels really right to me.

And on top of that there's the catalogue. Douglas Hyde always produce high end fetish object catalogues for their exhibitions and Feehily is the author of a number of artists's books. Sure I couldn't afford to eat lunch after buying this, but it kept me smiling all the way home on the bus, and hopefully it will be enough to stave off making a return visit before this exhibition ends in a weeks time. Yeah, that's how much time you have left to see this.

PAUL DORAN @ GREEN ON RED

Paul Doran is most famous for a series of work that took a love of impasto effects to the level of extreme sport, burying the canvas in a rich heap of brashly swept oil-paint. His new work by comparison feels incredibly sedate at first. Reminiscent of Howard Hodgkin, Dorans fractured little abstractions recall landscape painting in their humid greens and beizes, in almost all of the pieces on show here, the surface is animated by stuttering dark marks which in most cases form a kind of frame around the central action, consisting mainly of interlocking triangles. The muddied colours open up over time as the product of garish synthetic colours which survive in tiny flashes of mottled magenta, emerald and lemon at the edge of brushstrokes. Overall a subtle and clever show but not that exciting at the same time.



Paul Doran - Untitled

TERRY WINTERS @ IMMA

Signal to Noise is the name IMMA's curators have chosen for their recent retrospective of the painters last ten years. Held in the same wing of the museum that has over the last few years hosted large retrospectives for Juan Úsle and Howard Hodgkin and, like them, Winters has a canny knack for sublimating imagery into his large, dense compositions. According to the press release: "The 40 paintings and drawings explore the cerebral spaces of information technology and issues of cognition and narration as they relate to abstract painting." The exhibition barely makes a strong case for its premise, as shapes, figures, motifs and patterns are reintroduced remodelled, rearticulated and eventually dismantled through the painters brash and probing brushwork.

Not that it starts that promisingly, the first paintings we see are of more modest size and their tentative games with alternating narration of positive and negative space, seems like a big commotion over not much. The ideas of space articulated just aren't interesting enough to sustain the bombastic streaks of paint that criss-cross the canvases.

But then something changes, we move into the smaller rooms, where monochrome prints display a nice feel for placement, a certain crude brashness which is effective in ways it doesn't seem to be in paint. the rough scribble that he uses in place of hatching has a childlike charm and a crooked violence. The sheer number of them on the wall forces the curators point about information systems in overload but its obviousness is effective in a way that echos the prints themselves.



Terry Winters - In Blue

Suddenly the large canvases reappear, but this time, in such wild colour that they seem garish and overwhelming even without being rammed together from floor to ceiling. Mainly composed of large floating grids of rose-like configurations of space and spirograph designs. In the larger pieces the variations of the rose patterns bursts into three dimensions as they push and pull against each other and the picture plane, swirling around each other.